Hearts Inside of Hearts
by blueposy
Summary: Essentially - Soubi sees a picture of Ritsuka, and falls head-over-heels in love, etc. It's my first fic, and I hope it's up to par. Reviews would be lovely! Rated T for suggestiveness, just in case.
1. Examination

Chapter 1. Examination.

"Yes, yes, Sou-chan, perfect! Initiative! A helping hand! _Thank _you!" Kio exclaimed heartily, arms thrown in the air in dramatic gratitude to the heavens. I felt myself smirk - my interest in the junior art classes my confidante taught as an intern had always been minimal, and the brats' collective 'art' exhibition had an increasingly adverse effect. It wasn't my fault he'd lain the folder of student records squarely on top of the mail.

"No such luck, Kio," I dismissed gently, teeth gritting as I thumbed through bill after bill, decidedly moved a letter signed 'Minami Ritsu' to the 'Throw-Away-Without-Opening' pile, and sulked over the lack of _welcomed_ personal post.

I sensed a nearing, piercing-obsessed storm. "_Sou_-chan! All the things I've done for you! The sacrifices I've made for you! The cigarettes I've lit for you! _Please_. There's two drafts of the guest list somewhere in that folder, if you could just... write down the final one, excluding all the names that are crossed out... I... I will love you forever!"

I smiled. "What a bargain."

"So you'll do it?" he excitedly pleaded, eyes gleaming with puppy-dog hope.

Caving, I nodded and picked up the folder. It wasn't like I had anything better to do. "Sure, it sounds easy enough." As promised, two sloppily annotated lists of names strayed in the mess of papers and photographs the folder contained, as well as juvenile sketches of strawberries, birds, and flowers, the most dramatic of which had been credited to 'Hawatari Yuiko', whose handwriting was laced by the same ecstasy. Having leisurely gone through a small portfolio of barely discernible, smiling, pink-and-green kittens, I turned my undivided attention to the glossy surfaces of the photographs hidden underneath. The first depicted a scarily grinning pair of young boys; one with mint-green hair, the other with radiant Tyrian purple waves. This couple also featured quite predominantly in the pictures thereafter, often in the act of mixing the wrong colours, or making faces at the camera. Another starring role had been taken by a bespectacled boy of roughly the same age, whose black hair and ears were tipped by off-white. "Hey, Kio, how old are these kids?" I called, not really interested, still going through the (to be frank, ridiculously large amount of) pictures. "Ranging from twelve to sixteen, I think," he answered, "Why?"

My voice had taken a momentary leave of absence, and warm blood poured into my cheeks. I blinked down at the photograph I held, on which had been captured a creature of bone-chilling, trouser-tightening magnificence. His hair, which would scientifically be noted as black, had caught the best of the sun's rays, and shone a deep shade of indigo - a colour so brilliant it was matched only by the large eyes that hid underneath the fringe. A beige plaster had been stuck onto his alabaster cheek, which, rather than deriving from, somehow served to _enhance_ the accumulative beauty of his face. And he was smiling at the camera. Perfect little white teeth (Milk teeth, some? My stomach churned in awkward guilt) gleamed between pretty lips, upper and bottom incisors half a centimeter apart, as though he were in the midst of speech.

Disturbed abruptly from my awe-stricken reverie by a loud, repeated 'Why, Sou-chan?', I blinked away the rosy haze my vision had undergone. "No reason - who is h- who are _they_?" I asked, including the pink-haired, pig-tailed girl to keep from arousing unwanted suspicion.

Arousing unwanted suspicion? I was going quickly mad under the influence of a single picture.

"Hawatari Yuiko - the girl who's done most of the sketches in there, and Aoyagi Ritsuka," he answered upon having glanced carelessly at the photograph.

"And... uh, Aoyagi Ristuka (my stomach gave another jolt at saying his name alone, and I felt my brain cells sizzle to a rapid death), is he in your class as well?" I asked, flipping quickly through the rest of the photographs, "I mean, he's only in one picture."

Kio nodded, "Yep, he's in the class - he's in so few of the pictures because he tends to be the one taking them. Oh - did you make sure to not write down his parents on the guest list? They both cancelled, he'll be coming with Yuiko-san."

The guest list. Right. I hurriedly finished it off (to my embarrassment, mouthing 'Aoyagi Ritsuka' to myself), and got up, scooting the closed folder with the final guest list on top of it, over the counter toward Kio. "Here. All done. I'm, uh, gonna take a nap. When's the exhibition again?" He looked on the verge of explosion. "Sou-chan! It's in three days! Have you forgotten? You better come, you _promised_ - if you planned something else for that day, I will personally ensure that yo--" "Don't worry. I'll definitely be there." Definitely.

I dragged my feet into my bedroom, hands buried deep into my pockets, fingertips smoothing over the glossy corner of the photograph I'd shoved into one. My whole being was alight.

-----

Laying back on my bed, pillows propped up against the low headboard, I held the picture up and held my breath, studying him intently. I folded away the smiling girl, Yuiko, and stared at Ritsuka's smiling mouth, shining eyes. "Ritsuka." The name sent a shiver down my spine. I said it again. "Ritsuka." And again, but quietly. "...Ritsuka." The boy in the picture smiled, and smiled, and smiled. The blood seared through my veins.

I knew it was stupid. He was, at most, sixteen. What was I expecting, a philosophical discussion regarding Rembrandt's favoured techniques? I knew it was stupid. It was so stupid, and I was insane. But I kept the picture. And a picture like that, on which purple eyes shone with mad desperation, you kept for one reason.

I lowered my hand to my fly, palm nudging my own blatant arousal. "Ritsuka."


	2. Exhibition

Chapter 2: Exhibition

"Sou-chan, you didn't have to dress up for me!" I grinned back at Kio, whose brightly printed T-shirt (admittedly polished up by the dressy black jacket he wore over it) served as an adequate inverse to the black mohair turtleneck and black jeans I had selected thoughtfully.

"I figured it'd rest some motherly hearts to know that their kids' tie-dye-crazed, hippy art teacher has at least one sane friend," I carefully explained, earning myself a whine and a surprisingly strengthy blow to the shoulder.

"And I'm sure a dapperly clad, rockstar-figured giant with a ponytail will put their worries to rest!" he deadpanned.

* * *

Inwardly praising the catering Kio had somehow managed to book, I savoured the octopus on the back of my tongue before swallowing. Having idly lingered by the food and refreshments table for no less than twenty minutes, I fought the strange desire to go home, and awaited any form of intrigue in the paintings distributed throughout the gallery. It did come, in the form of... Yuiko? Yes, the girl I had folded carefully out of the picture. God was surely playing tricks with me. She blinked her massive blue eyes at me, the lids of which glimmered with silver glitter presumably applied by a proud mother, before smiling.

"Hi!" Her voice was loud, but pleasantly so, and rung cheerily with music.

"Hello, there." I smiled, and watched her expectantly. She looked older than she did in the picture, her height and considerable figure adding a few years to my prior estimation. "I'm sorry, sir, but are you the refreshments man?"

Smirking, I shook my head (the assumption was reasonable, after all, as I hadn't stood further than ten feet away from the table over the course of the entire night), "No, I'm not, but I'll pour you a glass - juice, cola?"

The girl glanced thoughtfully over her shoulder, long pink pigtails curling prettily, before looking back at me. "Um," she began, voice lowered to a pitch of privacy, as she muttered to herself, "Ritsuka-kun would pick cola..." My heart jumped, I straightened up. "Two glasses of cola, please, sir!" she finally chirped, beaming. I obliged, and passed her the tall glasses of soda.

"Arigatou!" She skittered off. And I, with my disobedient feet, followed soundlessly.

It was easy to pass under the guise of a genuinely interested viewer, as there were pieces of substantial beauty hung here and there. The number of childish images of pets and hearts and flowers was one that would have to be overlooked, and could be forgiven due to clean painstrokes and artistic promise. Yuiko-san stood in the corner of the gallery, by the large glass door through which the faintly lit but huge garden was visible. She was facing me, but her attention was fixed on the smaller boy in front of her, whose back I looked up against. Keeping a safe distance, I watched the boy's tail swing lazily from left to right, coiling around thin air and strangling the oxygen before loosening its grip and resigning to the bored swaying.

"Sou-chan!" With excellent timing, Kio flung one arm around my shoulder. "Come, come, you've finally gravitated away from the food, let me introduce you to my star students! My talented, stellar pupils!"

Chuckling quietly, I let him escort me toward the group of young adolescents (there was no way Yuiko was younger than thirteen), and forced a thin-lipped smile. The little company consisted of the girl I'd met before, the boy with the white-tipped ears (Shioiri Yayoi, I had gathered from the guest list), a girl Kio introduced to me as 'Kimizuka Osamu', and... my heart stilled in my chest... Aoyagi Ritsuka.

"Kids! This is Agatsuma Soubi - he's the genius behind the butterfly paintings I showed you before our first field trip." So that's where those had gone. One mystery solved.

Yuiko spoke first, "Wow! Those are so beautiful, Agatsuma-san! Sensei said they were by one of his favourite artists."

'Sensei' Kio snickered awkwardly, and mouthed 'I lied. You suck' at me. He then, with a happy wave to the 'children' and I, scurried off in direction of the table of alcoholic beverages, of which he was visibly/audibly/olfactively a frequent visitor.

The dark-haired girl, Osamu, smiled at me before her gaze traveled toward Yayoi. "Yuiko-san's mum let her wear makeup to the exhibition - doesn't she look pretty?" Yayoi nodded enthusiastically, a gesture that went unnoticed by Yuiko, whose pleading blue eyes were locked desperately on Ritsuka. He didn't comment, instead contently slurping at his coke. After a moment, the girl seemed to give up, and reached for her friends thin wrist.

"Osamu-san! Come with me, I'll ask my mother if we can borrow her lipstick!" she pitched up excitedly. The pair hurried off, Yayoi on their heels.

And I was alone with Ritsuka. Alone with Ritsuka. Granted, it wasn't the romantic rendezvous I had fantasized about, but we were alone, together, in the secluded corner of an art gallery. I knew when to count my blessings. He'd seemingly polished off his drink, and wide mauve eyes for which I had not prepared were turned in my direction. I smiled softly.

"I think makeup is idiotic," he told me decidedly, proudly - as though this opinion distinguished him from the bulk of naive teenagers. He didn't need opinions to distinguish him - with a face like that, he was set miles apart from the rest of humanity without a word. But I nodded. Hell, if he'd told me that all baby bunnies deserved a slow, painful death, I'd have agreed. "But she looks pretty," he added. The lack of conviction in his words spared me from inappropriate jealousy.

"Is she your girlfriend?" I found myself asking.

Ritsuka looked at me quietly before lowering his gaze and shaking his head. "No. She isn't."

I knew little of music, but his voice was strung together of the finest violins.

"Which one of these paintings are yours?" I asked him, nodding at the walls by which we were surrounded.

"I didn't do any paintings - I took the pictures," he replied, and moved closer to the door. "They're not in this room."

Doubting they would be in the garden, I glanced over my shoulder at the passageways to the other quarters.

I looked back to him. He no longer wore the band-aid in the picture, but had indeed traded it in for a faintly purpled bruising by the corner of his lower lip. It suited him, and noticing this made me feel perverse. It then dawned on me that he was watching me intently, shiny eyes filled with expectation. I hadn't replied.

"Do you take pictures of flowers and animals, the ones they paint?" I asked.

"No."

"They're quite beautiful," I delicately pointed out, only pressing the matter to hear more of his voice. I couldn't help it - I was obsessed.

"Beauty is useless," Ritsuka answered, with more sincerity than I had expected. "It's temporary, and it's no good at all. A delusion."

"You only say that because you _are_ beautiful. It's anything but useless - it's dangerous. Beautiful people, without having had to work for their merit and influence, destroy everything."

He looked at me disbelievingly, and began to smile. It was otherworldly, the way his smile took a while to spread across those shapely lips, the lower filled and blossomed red by the bruise. My curiosity leapt, his expression didn't. Pulling the glass door open, he turned to me with the same haunting eyes I had photographically enjoyed for the past few nights.

"Soubi," he said, surprising me with both his memory of my name, and the intimacy in which it was uttered. "Do you want to go outside?"

* * *

We stood in the orchard silently. The walk there had transgressed without a word spoken, and I had stopped only because he did once we reached a small garden bridge, the edges of which were adorned in sneakily vining flowers and artificial candles. Ritsuka was standing by the water bank, and looked across the narrow, make-shift 'river', ears twitching every time a lone firefly zoomed low over his head. It was incredible, and there was not enough room in my ribcage for my swollen heart. I was captivated by him. I was in love with him? I was going insane.

He turned around as I lit a cigarette. "Soubi," he said again, and I glanced up to meet vaguely disapproving eyes. "Do you catch and pin butterflies to paint them?"

"No, I don't."

Confusion wove its way across his seraphic features. "Then how do you know how to paint them?"

His voice was so pure, it made my insides ache. "I remember them."

"Without them in front of you, or pictures?"

"Without them in front of me, or pictures," I confirmed.

I let myself notice what he was wearing as he seemed to digest this information. He wore skin-tight, black trousers and ankle-boots with a half-inch heel that still kept the tips of his ears no higher than my shoulder. His upper body, remarkably thin with almost girlish angles, was dressed in dark burgundy that was hardly told apart from black in the night air. The hems under his arms, on his sides, were two inches apart, where darker suede cords were stitched, leaving bare triangles of porcelain skin in naked view. This pattern was mirrored at the height of his chest, showing off sharp collarbones, and on his back, to just about the bottom of his shoulder blades. The flesh there seemed so thinly woven over the bone, that the elegant scapulas looked like trapped wings more than anything else. I swallowed.

"How old are you, Soubi?" he asked me.

"Twenty-three." The guilt painted its presence in faint pink on my cheeks. "How old are you, Ritsuka?"

"Fifteen."

He was close, all of a sudden. Really close. He placed one thin-fingered hand on my abdomen as I peered down at him through clear, round glasses. The fuzz of my sweater kept his fingers noncommittally trapped in place, and he brought his gaze up to meet mine. His eyes were shining.

It was his fault. I leaned in and kissed him. Curling my hand around the back of his neck, I kept him reigned in, and parted his velvet lips with my own. I felt him flinch at the pressure on his little purple bruise, but he didn't pull away, slim figure instead melting in my grasp. It was perfect, and he tasted of cola, and of love.

* * *

A/N: Thank you for the feedback so far – I've got half of the next chapter written up, and I think I'm starting to develop some plot. Reviews would be lovely, lovely, lovely! x


	3. Analepsis I

When I inhaled, I smelled Ritsuka, and reveled in the munificent softness of his lips. And something (a memory, a cursed imprint), sealed away in the deepest penitentiary of my mind, rattled the bars of its jail.

* * *

***

_"Are you kidding, hm?" _

A voice, harbouring the lazy flames of hellfire, sliced a fresh wound into silence's skin.

"Tell me you're kidding. Tell me you're kidding - you love me? You think you _love_ me?"

Wound up like a music box, the note of humorous derision turned eerily higher, until it scratched the surface of sardonic arrogance, sending ripples of discomfort down the spine of the victim to this verbal attack.

"You don't _know_ me."

The words, painful already, were annealed by the gleaming white reflection on a silver blade. The victim held his breath, as his assailant stepped slowly closer.

"You don't know me. You don't love me."

The same words, fresh wounds with every utterance.

Real wounds, now. Skin-deep, and blooming with the red rose-petals of blood. Removing broken spectacles, the fair-haired artist lowered himself from a one-legged kneel, to a crouching hybrid, head hung.

He whispered something nondescript.

"Don't say my name," the same broken-cello voice ordered him in a lazy slur.

Soubi's throat was narrow, and tasted coppery and sour, the scent of blood stealing any and all relief the next breaths may have brought. Eyes fogging over, the invisible screen before them flashed red, grey, red, grey, before settling on red – the red streaming between his own fingers, the red seeping from wounds on his neck into his collar, the red blinding him as it glued flaxen eyelashes together.

But every touch of the blade had been volunteered for; every electric jolt of unprecedented pain cleansed his veins and renewed his… love? That was what he had called it, yet chanted words disagreed with this identification.

"You don't love me," the other declared once again, statue looming over his subordinate before he, too, lowered himself onto his knees, chin leveling with the top of the other's blond head. "Look up. Look at me. Look at me, _Soubi_."

The shining knife was dipped, it stained tip pressing dully against a square centimeter of collarbone that had not yet been violated.

_"You love me? You're pathetic."_

***

________________

A/N: Riiight…. So you know how this was going to be some sort of comedy? Fail. We're headed for Angstville. Population, Soubi.

Sorry about not updating for ages – classes have stolen my Soubi/Ritsuka time. Next chapter, however, should be up before Sunday. To make up for the shortness of this one :)

PS. It's **a flash-back **kind of thing, the second part. In case you didn't get that.

PPS. And though I don't want to ruin anything, I don't want you guys to get confused - the 'evil guy' is not Ritsuka. Again, refer to the PS. :)


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